Why does PDFKit/wkhtmltopdf hang but renders PDF as expected when Rails app is killed?

Question

Background

After reading around it seemed to me that Prawn is out and wkhtmltopdf is in. It also seems like the PDFKit and wicked_pdf gems for Rails are the new co

Answer 1

The fix by scarver2 worked for me as advertised. But I needed a more recent version of wkhtmltopdf. Since the homebrew version still seems outdated (it still hangs on the command line), and since there isn't a recent precompiled binary available, I used the os x build script to compile one myself:

$ git clone git@github.com:wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf.git
$ cd wkhtmltopdf
$ ./build_osx.sh     # i'm running 10.9.2
$ bin/wkhtmltopdf --version                                                                                  
Name:
  wkhtmltopdf 0.12.1-72a9f2066fe9ffd162dec007a4d9b6a5cd63b670
$ curl www.example.com | bin/wkhtmltopdf - test.pdf  # render pdf of example.com
$ open test.pdf   # to confirm pdf 

I'm using pdfkit 0.6.2 with Rails 3.2.17. I put the binary in /vendor and, in a pdfkit initializer, pointed to it with config.wkhtmltopdf. So far, so good.